Anyone who follows the markets or the economy knows about gross domestic product and the consumer price index, but sometimes those well-known indicators don't give us the clearest view of where the economy has been or where it is going.

As the first anniversary of President Barack Obama's election approaches this week, Valerie Jarrett, one of Obama's friends and closest advisers, says this when asked about an unfulfilled promise to heal the partisan divide in Washington — to undo the "partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long," as Obama put it on election night 2008: